Did Paul Ryan intentionally sabotage his own health care plan?

Why the speaker of the House might have purposefully written a terrible bill no one likes

Paul Ryan laughs.
(Image credit: Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)

Speaker of the House Paul Ryan finally introduced his proposed replacement for ObamaCare late Monday. It did not go well.

Democrats were predictably appalled that the GOP proposal, called the American Health Care Act, would essentially take away health care from millions of people, many of them poor, in order to pay for upper-class tax cuts. Moderate Sen. Bob Casey (D-Penn.) summed up the feelings of the Democratic caucus when he declared that the bill's savage cuts to Medicaid were a "disgrace to our nation" and that "I will fight it with everything I have."

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Scott Lemieux

Scott Lemieux is a professor of political science at the College of Saint Rose in Albany, N.Y., with a focus on the Supreme Court and constitutional law. He is a frequent contributor to the American Prospect and blogs for Lawyers, Guns and Money.